painting without numbers : my journey into abstraction

In a letter to her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert, Emily Dickinson wrote "subjects hinder talk." I like that. I’d rather not pick a subject. I’d rather play with indeterminacy, thereby better inviting the collaboration of the viewer into the experience of a painting. No subjects or representations; rather colors and movements and textures - "pictures of nothing" informed by the Japanese practice of "zuihitsu," letting the "wandering brush" - or in my case the painting knife - take me wherever it wants to go.

Saturday, July 29, 2017

Four of my paintings are included in the Upstate Artists Guild Member Show at the Albany Barn: Stage 1 Gallery, August 4th through September 22nd.

Saturday, May 20, 2017

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Openings

The impastos and gouaches in the small gallery
on the third floor, the long-limbed bronzes
crowding the poorly lit hallways, the after-hour
departures rehung as an homage to the lives
of the long coats and wide brims that filled
the spaces between the shows and now daily wait
for the commuter train and the safety of the suburbs
are not unlike the visitors who drift through,
stopping occasionally for a closer look
at the work of the brush or painting knife,
the blending of color, the play of light and dark,
scribbling their lives, page after page,
revision upon revision, against the collage
of empty limbs in the courtyard moving to the rhythm
of the wind amid the color fields of seasons
with their unmet promises, their table settings,
their half-filled water glasses.

three squares a day (triptych)acrylic on canvas6x6"2017

Thursday, March 2, 2017

I paint to figure out how it works. - Robert Ryman

journeyacrylic on canvas20x20"2016

Friday, December 23, 2016

One of the valuable things [abstraction] does more fiercely than a lot of other art is to make us think and read what others think. - Kirk Varnedoe

pink toweracrylic on canvas48x24"2016

Friday, December 16, 2016

We have been trained to see painting as "pictures," with storytelling connotations, abstract or literal, in a space usually limited and enclosed by a frame which isolates the image. It has been shown that there are possibilities other than this manner of "seeing" painting. An image could be said to be "real" if it is not an optical reproduction, if it does not symbolize or describe so as to call up a mental picture. This "real" or "absolute" image is only confined by our limited perception. - Robert Ryman

red toweracrylic on canvas48x24"2016

Friday, December 9, 2016

There are no mistakes. - Miles Davis

grey toweracrylic on canvas48x24"2016

Friday, December 2, 2016

Stop before you're done.

yellow toweracrylic on canvas48x24"2016

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Two of my paintings are included in ARTBAR Gallery's ART for the Holidays 2016 Show, December 3rd through the 30th.

a mind of winter IIIacrylic on canvas20x20"2016

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Three of my paintings are included in UAG's Members Show, August 5th through the 26th.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

a mind of winter Iacrylic on canvas20x20"2015

a mind of winter IIacrylic on canvas15x30"2015

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

[Agnes] Martin’s negotiations between image and thought, the author believes, were central to both her art and her often troubled mental life. Not until after the artist’s death in 2004 was her diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia publicly revealed. Martin heard voices. Occasionally she fell into catatonic states. Found wandering the streets during a psychotic episode in 1967, she was committed to Bellevue, where she underwent shock treatment. - Patricia Albers, On the Grid: Two New Books About Agnes Martin,The New York Times Book Review, June 25, 2015

tree tooacrylic on canvas36x36"2016

Friday, July 3, 2015

on a rollacrylic on canvas48x30"2015

Thursday, June 18, 2015

Twenty of my paintings are on exhibit at the Arts Center of the Adirondacks (Blue Mountain Lake) today through July 18th.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Painting, for me, is like an excavation site. As I develop layers of line and color and idea, some images are buried and new ones emerge. During the process, I discover meaning in the disparate clues and create a new "civilization" as a painting. . . . As I "excavate" each theme, the element of surprise keeps me engaged. - Barbara Moody, Montserrat College of Art

#51 (primary)acrylic on canvas48x24"2014

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Like in Japanese gardening, you want to allow some leaves to remain when you're sweeping a path so it will feel natural. - John Zurier

#70 (mi casa es tu casa)acrylic on canvas24x48"2015

Thursday, April 23, 2015

On Kawara (1932-2014) was one of the leading figures of Conceptual Art. He was best known for his Today series: monochromatic canvases, whose only image was the date on which they were made, rendered in meticulous white letters that look almost printed against fields of red, black, or gray. In 1997, Kawara placed seven of these in kindergarten classrooms around the globe, a social project he called Pure Consciousness, its title borrowed from a quote by Leo Tolstoy, referring to the stillness of one’s sense of self in relation to the passage of time - a Zen-like idea that suggests paying attention to something as basic as the passage of time.

#35 (obelisk)acrylic on canvas48x24"2015

Thursday, November 20, 2014

One wants one's work to be the world, but of course it's never the world. The work is in the world; it never contains the whole thing. - Jasper Johns

#41acrylic on canvas40x30"2010

Saturday, October 4, 2014

I worry about the difficulty of making things, or the difficulty of knowing what to do. I may think, having been working at [painting] all these years, why don't I find it easy, since it's a relatively simple activity? - Jasper Johns

gray area 5acrylic on canvas8x8"2014

Friday, October 3, 2014

Four of my paintings are included in UAG's Outside the Line Show, opening this evening and running through October 24th.

gray area 4acrylic on canvas10x8"2013

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

The Essential Cy Twombly (D.A.P., September 30, 2014), edited by Nicola Del Roscio, is the ultimate overview and most accessible survey of Twombly's work to date, presenting paintings and cycles of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs from his diverse oeuvre.

gray area 3collage14x11"2014

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Jasper Johns on making art: Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.

gray area 2acrylic on canvas6x6"2014

Friday, September 5, 2014

One of my panel paintings is included in UAG's Members' Show, opening this evening and running through September 26th.

#51acrylic on canvas48x24"2014

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

You just go on your nerve. - Frank O'Hara

#82acrylic on canvas30x48"2014

Friday, November 1, 2013

My painting, Retracing Our Steps to Utopia, is in UAG's Mixed Media Exhibit, opening this evening, and running through November 29th.

Friday, August 2, 2013

Friday, July 5, 2013

Three of my paintings are in UAG's Midsummer Night's Dream Exhibit, opening this evening and running through July 26th.

scene from the airship Iacrylic on galvanized steel attached to plexiglass with nuts, bolts, & spacers13x36"2013

Monday, June 17, 2013

Armed with a camera and Artist's Questionnaire, Joe Fig entered 24 artists' studios and documented their day-to-day creative life, covering everything from how they set a creative mood, how they choose titles, how they organize their studios, which painting tools they prefer, to whether they sit or stand to contemplate their work. It's all in Inside the Painter's Studio (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009).

brand new dayacrylic on aluminum attached to plexiglass with nuts, bolts, and spacers36x24"2013

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Channeling the Lascaux Cave painters?

. . . and this little piggyacrylic on canvas6x12"2007

Monday, June 10, 2013

I sit for two or three hours and then in 15 minutes I can do a painting. - Cy Twombly

#33acrylic on canvas40x30"2006

Thursday, June 6, 2013

A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience. - Mark Rothko

#13
acrylic on canvas
40x30"
2010

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

I love refrigerator magnets. Hence fridgeArt: small (7x5") abstract acrylics on magnetized canvases. A painting on every refrigerator!

fridgeArtacrylic on magnetized canvas7x5"2013

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work. - Chuck Close

#21acrylic on canvas20x16"2007

Friday, May 31, 2013

My well-worn copy of Jane Waller's The Human Form in Clay (Crowood, 2001) is a great resource for ideas with its bios, descriptions of working methods, and pics of sculptures of 50 contemporary artists who use clay to portray the human form.

Missymixed media16x5"2012

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

My main advice [to a beginning artist] is to just be in your studio and work and not be worried about the art world. I think the art world should take up maybe 10 percent of your time. - Joan Snyder

#45acrylic on canvas36x18"2009

Saturday, May 25, 2013

Enjoying Suzanne P. Hudson's Robert Ryman: Used Paint (MIT, 2009) which addresses Ryman's assertion that what engages him is not what to paint but how to paint.

in justacrylic on canvas40x30"2010

Thursday, May 23, 2013

The less there is to look at, the more important it is that we look at it closely and carefully. - Kirk Varnedoe

Friday, May 17, 2013

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

The fear - and freedom - of abstraction.

#55acrylic on canvas48x24"2013

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Agnes Martin reinvented painting by taking everything out of the painting: colour, composition. The things that are all beneath notice in a painting became the subject of the painting. You could say minimalist in that way, but they take you to a step beyond in perception - the touch and the brush stroke, the way the pencil line was drawn over the surface of the weave of the linen. These paintings exist more like music or mantras than they do like paintings as we knew them. - Arne Glimcher

#67acrylic on canvas48x24"2012

Friday, May 10, 2013

For most modern artists, a picture is not a statement, nor does not emerge from a preconceived plan. Every brushstroke, even the first, is a response to something that has occurred before, on the canvas or in the artist's mind or memory, and will influence what happens next. - Calvin Tomkins in a 2006 New Yorker profile of Jasper Johns

when virtual trees flattenacrylic on aluminum attached to plexiglass with nuts, bolts, and spacers9x31"2013